Articles Posted by sohodojo

Recent blog entries by sohodojo

At Sohodojo we have a
few 'words to live by'. They include 'Small is Good'
and a corollary, 'Simpler is Better'. As developers,
most of us have learned this viscerally with regard to our
own programming habits.

But simplicity and intimacy (an aspect of smallness,
Miller's "Magic Number 7 plus/minus 3") apply at many
levels of our lives.

The Advogato community as compared to the
SourceXchange marketplace/community is a clear case
in point my recent experience.

Visit to the SourceXchange site and see what kind
of impression you get about what is going on there. Play a
little game of 'Find the developers'... the community that
is the 'backbone' of sXc's OSS marketplace. Try to find and
get juiced about the projects that sXc has been matchmaker
on. It's tough.

You are much more likely to find how they are 'moving
and shaking' to spend the $35 million in venture
money they have raised. You'll see announcements of all
the other movers and shakers they are partnering with and
how grand and wonderful their plans are for mainstreaming
OSS.

It's not that doing this 'big corporate partnering'
stuff is bad. It just should not be at the expense of, or
at a higher priority than doing a good job of, their
core competency which is developing and nurturing
the developer/project community which is the basis of their
business model.

The stats of our logs this month tell the tale. Here are
the unique visitor sessions referred to Sohodojo (we
host our sXc project website) from SourceXchange and from
Advogato:

SourceXchange to Sohodojo: 110

Advogato to Sohodojo: 1165

(These unique visits are through October 1-20th.)

Simpler is better. With one (politically
incorrect) GIF image and some clever
programming (mod_virgule), Advogato is helping
me (and Sohodojo) network and collaborate more effectively
than the 'big guns' at SourceXchange. I am meeting exciting
new people with similar research and development interests.
Folks are finding out about who I am, what juices me up,
and vice versa.

This is very exciting and very interesting... and I am
glad to be a part of it.

Finally, if you want to delve into a bit more of
the 'Simplicity Movement', check out author Bill Jensen's
SimplerWork
website which complements his 'Simplicity: The New
Competitive Advantage' book.

Thanks for your thoughtful post
on OSS and 'Third World' social
problems. Since I am not a well-connected youngster
with a bunch of OSS buddies on Advogato to cross-certify
me, I can't reply publicly to your post. At the moment, all
I can do is post this diary post. (Update: I
left 'Observer Hell' thanks to a couple additional
confidence votes,
so I can now post this entry as a reply!)

While I would agree with some that the Third World
has
massive problems which defy solution with software alone,
folks who have replied to your article may be missing an
important point.

It isn't what Third World 'Have-nots' do _directly_
with
OSS initially that matters. Rather, it is far more
important that 'guerrilla activists' have access to
powerful software technologies to mount their own
grassroots campaigns to contribute to solving these
pressing social problems that matters.

For example, my wife and I were Executive
Consultants in
object technology at IBM leading the classic 'Road Warrior'
lives and it was killing us, spiritually as well as
physically. We are now hosts of Sohodojo, an OSS 'applied
R&D Lab' where we are attempting to rally OSS
developers to
contribute to our 'role/actor executable business model'
technology agenda.

We are doing this because we believe such technology
is
essential as the 'software infrastructure' for 'Small is
Good' business-webs which we intend to apply in business
development within the U.S. Enterprise Communities and
Empowerment Zones. (You will often hear these communities
referred to as 'distressed' or targets for 'renewal'.)

For us, it is more important what you do with
technology
rather than seeing technology as an end in itself. That is
the greatest frustration I find with the OSS community. We
have so many folks with all this energy and skills and they
think that technology for its own sake is the
motivation for what they do. Technology is only really
valuable when you apply it to something useful.

For us, that did not mean traveling around the world
helping IBM customers build yet another 'enterprise system'.

If you would like to know more about our
perspective,
including our recent political 'change insurgency', feel
free to visit these URLs:

Dacta: Thanks for your comments about
Freshmeat and their not accepting 'spec writing' projects.
I hear you in terms of the 'many start, few amount to much'
dynamic.

But I think that is where the 'human editorial review'
process comes into play. Freshmeat should not 'blanket
refuse' all projects in the early stages of the development
lifecycle. They should take a look at the submission and
make a judgement call.

Our 'Spec Writing for Web-based Project
Planning' project, for example, is piling up a bunch of
useful information which is of interest and utility to Open
Source developers. I know this because our project homepage
is now the third most active entrypoint into
Sohodojo! And the interesting thing is that only about a
quarter of those folks come in by way of our 'active
project' page at SourceXchange. By far, they arrive by
search engine queries which include 'Open Source'
and 'project planning' or 'project management'. So we see
that there is interest and value in our work.

We'd sure like developers to be able to find us more
directly via Freshmeat. Perhaps, they will consider
a 'provisional status' for projects in the early stages of
the development lifecycle... accepted with a 'produce a
tangible result by this date or be dropped' category for
specs and such?

Anyway, Dacta, thanks for your
comments. Regardless of what Freshmeat does, my minor rant
did have the positive effect of bringing in my first cert-
votes! I'm inching my way out of Observer status!

Cool, I got my first certification votes last night! I
guess some folks resonated with my minor rant about
Freshmeat not respecting the early stages of the
software development lifecycle.

I was starting to think, "Well, the idea here is cool,
but it seems biased toward an 'In Crowd' dynamic..."
As I poked around it seemed like if you and your
friends 'ganged up' on behalf of each other that you could
pile up certs and move out of the nowhereville of
Observer status.

Sure, this sounds like 'Sour grapes' from a
'loner'/'outlier'... and well, I guess it is. But
then an interesting thing happened this morning when I got
some votes from kindly strangers...

Anyone that voted for me last night became a 'Who the
Hell is that?' Quest for me this morning. I read their
diaries closer than I had read diaries previously. I went
to their homepages. I went to their projects. No, I didn't
do code reviews. But I poked around enough to get a decent
feeling for the person... and then I reciprocated with cert
votes for them!

That's when I realized how deceptively constructive
Advogato is... I am getting to know about folks that I
would not likely come into contact with in my daily
routine. It's like a 'neighborhood pub' for Open Source
developers as opposed to a 'Certification Guild'. Sure,
there is a great need for project-based, post-mortem,
public 'trust' (competence) metrics, but there is also a
need for this less formal 'buddy system'... it's like
a 'Mixer' for the freshmen class, a social environment to
meet and greet your peers.

Since
this project is intended to be for the benefit of the Open
Source development community, we've been trying to 'spread
the word' about our project. As you'll notice on our
Advogato project page, we don't have a Freshmeat listing
URL. This is because we were denied a listing because our
project deliverable is not a 'downloadable piece of
software'!?!?

Damn! What a narrow and inappropirate
criteria for an index listing. This project will certainly
lead to MANY future bits of downloadable software, and at
some level, the SRS itself can be considered 'downloadable'
(although it is a 'document' rather than a 'piece of
software').

I'll fire a note back to Freshmeat making a
case for their expanding the index to accommodate the
earliest stages of the Software Development Lifecycle. But
I don't expect too kindly a response. Too often Open Source
projects jump way ahead of the game and folks start
slinging code before examining the problem domain,
considering what's come before and deciding what to build.

I hope this trend is just 'early adopter' enthusiasm and
we'll see an evening out of support and recognition for the
all important front-end problem analysis. Having spent
twenty-odd years as an 'extreme' Smalltalk developer, I
absolutely know that the time you take to 'know your
domain' pays off many times over when the code starts
flying.

What do you think? (I tried to add a Wiki tag
here to allow interaction, but I don't think I know what I
am doing!)